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Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

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Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#701

Post by 3pt14159 »

hbn wrote: post #50
3pt14159 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't be tracked If that were true, then criminal elements wouldn't need to severely launder their money. It's a spectrum. Cash can be tracked, each legitimate bill has a unique serial number, and yes, at least at present I haven't heard of private actors outside of those that service law enforcement tracking it, but the reality is that if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you…

> if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite obviously tracked. Not really? As far as they know I could have spent that $8000 on a used car from another guy who then used that same money to buy a motorcycle. It's untracked for all the time it's not in the bank's hands.

Like I said, this is a spectrum.

It obviously could have gone through an intermediary, but it usually doesn't for honest transactions. If one of the two people is already a person of interest to law enforcement, a warrant can be called up to figure out exactly what happened. Added to other sources of information, like the new registry of the car or motorcycle, a pretty reliable history can be constructed.

Don't think in binary. Think in continuums of likelihood. Also, this isn't a new concept. It was covered by HBO's The Wire many years ago.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#702

Post by tchaffee »

kortilla wrote: post #696
tchaffee wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evidence and due process are important for convicting someone of a crime. You're not violating a basic human right when you deny a credit card transaction. The requirement for evidence and due process should be far lower, if even needed at all.

> You're not violating a basic human right when you deny a credit card transaction. This doesn’t work when it’s something basic like payment processing. It’s the same reason we decided as a society that people can’t “trust their gut” and deny housing to people based on the color of their skin.

Housing is a basic human right. However you can deny housing to someone because they belong to a hate group.

Running a profitable online business is not even a basic human right. No one owes you payment processing. Forcing someone to be a supplier to a hate group violates their basic human rights. If payment processors were discriminating against a protected class such as race or age then you might have a point.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#703

Post by polski-g »

tchaffee wrote: post #261
onionisafruit wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would go further and remove the "lawful" from that. If you pay me $50 it shouldn't matter to the payment processor whether I gave you a painting or a blow job in return.

And if it's for human trafficking? Payment processors are made up of people, and people have to have the freedom of drawing a moral line they won't cross. The real problem as I see it is that payment processing is a near monopoly. Better competition and smaller players would almost guarantee that every transaction except the most egregious would have a willing payment processor. Diversity is so often the best answer…

> Payment processors are made up of people, and people have to have the freedom of drawing a moral line they won't cross

Not for services deemed important enough:

> U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who cited her religious beliefs in refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#704

Post by TimJRobinson »

menus wrote: post #519
faeriechangling wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is the problem that crypto solved for the most part, independence from a few oligopolistic PROCESSORS. While I am still not a "Buying literal digital currency is a sound investment" true believer, I feel recent events are making people keen to throw the baby out with the bathwater in the notion of decentralised crypto as a medium of exchange.

After watching Folding Ideas' video on crypto and NFT (1) I am less convinced that is decentralised. It goes over how crypto ended up becoming the very thing it swore to destroy (banks and oligopolies). Also anyone with the means can still do a 51% attack if they wanted. (1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

They can't though. Firstly NFTs and their image storage location are unrelated to tokens.

In regards to 51% attacks they aren't going to happen to Bitcoin or Ethereum.

For possible flaws, to put it in terms that technical non-crypto people understand, his arguments are like saying "well Heart Bleed happened and this could happen again thus all computers are unsafe and you can never trust them to be secure" which is technically true but that doesn't mean we should abandon storing our own data and give it all to google to keep it safe for us (which we do with money today). Blockchain developers are very smart and build defense in depth against attacks, there's a reason why Ethereum has tens of billions of USD stored on it.

There are protocols for transferring cash on Ethereum (LUSD, RAI) that you can use that no one, not even nation states spending billions of dollars can stop you from using.

The tradeoff is they won't scale to the world. But then there are less secure protocols (DAI, USDC) that do scale which will be fine for 99.9% of people (who aren't terrorists or being targeted by the government).

Tech is all about tradeoffs and you can learn about them from experts in the field rather than an obviously anti-crypto YouTube video to understand them.

All of these are far more censorship resistant than any banks or traditional financial services.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#705

Post by TimJRobinson »

faeriechangling wrote: post #516
Seattle3503 wrote: post #13

My concerns about a cashless society are the power it hands to a few oligopolistic credit card processors. Look at what happened to Pornhub. Regardless of whether you think Pornhub was in the wrong, it is striking that a business was cut off from global financial system by a small number of credit card companies. This was done without due process and under no countries laws. That should scare us at least a little.

Which is the problem that crypto solved for the most part, independence from a few oligopolistic PROCESSORS. While I am still not a "Buying literal digital currency is a sound investment" true believer, I feel recent events are making people keen to throw the baby out with the bathwater in the notion of decentralised crypto as a medium of exchange.

Yea stablecoins (fiat tokens) are by far the biggest successful use case of crypto. It's unfortunate that so many on Hacker News still think crypto is Bitcoin and other wannabe currencies (which never made sense as mediums of exchange) so don't notice the solution to these issues is already here and being adopted all over the world already.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#706

Post by lisasays »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #662
tekknik wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People just like the convenience, and cash is on its way out. My favorite question that many of the people on this site love to ignore, what about natural disasters? Do you believe CC terminals still work when the rest of the infrastructure has failed? Cash is far from on the way out, you’re being naive.

Sure, natural disaster occurs, then...maybe I have more things to worry about then having cash? If the POS is down at the store, the cell phone networks are surely down (since many POS these days are just cellphones attached to Stripe or similar), and I'm guessing your saying FEMA help won't come very soon, it will be everyone for themselves in the city? At least I won't be the only one suffering in such a DOOM scena…

But with cash you can at least, you know, go down to the corner store and buy yourself a bottle of water. And maybe even something to eat.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#707

Post by asdff »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #427
asdff wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on how big of a whale you are, something like runescape gp or some commodity in game is probably a more stable store of value than most crypto.

Perhaps, but yearly-wise, have in-game items ever gone up ?

Some things go up over a thousand percent in just six months:

https://secure.runescape.com/m=itemdb_rs/top100?list=2&scale...

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#709

Post by TimJRobinson »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #381
xg15 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses are one thing, but what I find truly dystopic about the idea of 100% cashless societies is that you could off people in the same way. If today, you lose access to your bank account for whatever reason, you still have various options how to purchase necessities: If you got some spare cash, you could use that; otherwise you could ask a friend to lend you some cash. In a cashless society, that won't work: Eve…

5% of the US population is unbanked. A "cashless" society would shut out a massive number of poor, undocumented, homeless, etc and make life even more difficult for them. It would also cause skyrocketing issues with burglary, mugging, etc. Many porn actors have been blacklisted from the US banking system. Conservatives got tired of losing US supreme court cases over censorship laws and regulations and shifted to enfo…

Your assumption is that only Government and Banks can process payments, which is not true. You must think outside that overton window to realize there are ways of paying people that don't require either.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#710

Post by novok »

arcticbull wrote: post #151
novok wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your effectively at the same spot again

How so? Currently if your transaction isn't permitted there's nothing you can do. Networks aren't required to process any transaction they don't want to process, or any kind of transaction they don't want to process.

You can appeal and talk to payment processors today, and they essentially tell you that your category of transactions has high fraud rates or exposes them to legal risk until you do XYZ impossible or arduous things to mitigate the liability or risk. They will use the same motte that they use now to justify their bailey reality.
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